68 with a Meryl Streep.) In the movie, after leisurely dinners Denys starts the Baroness on a story by giving her a first sentence, and she takes off from it, charming him and his affable, gre- garious business partner, Berkeley (Michael Kitchen), by spinning her fantasy through the indolent night and into the dawn. It's a mandarin form of Trivial Pursuit. And, like these spun- out stories, her "Seven Gothic Tales" are a form of distraction; they read as if she had devised them in the fevered atmosphere of all-night debauches (al- though actually she'd been working on them since her girlhood, and a bit of mold clung to them). It's awkward when Redford as Denys gives Karen a pen and tells her to write down her stories; his gesture and his words stick out-you can feel that the movie is reaching for a theme and trying to give him a function in making her a writer. (Actually, Karen Dinesen had published stories, in Danish, as early as 1907.) Onscreen (as in fact), the stories Karen confects to please him are told in her delicately accented En- glish, and Isak Dinesen wrote her "Gothic Tales" in English. This may have been a way of keeping Denys and the long nights of storytelling alive in her memory; it had a practical purpose, too, for a woman who hoped to earn a living. "Out of Africa" was also written in English, but she was no longer play- ing Scheherazade. A memoir of her years in Kenya, of the tribesmen and the farming, the book has a sovereign plainness; it's lordly, but it's magnifi- cent, too. Nothing in the movie sug- gests the directness and power of Dinesen's writing in "Out of Africa." I wish that the anecdotes in the book didn't so often exalt her; I wish that she weren't so determined to be her own heroine. But she is a real writer, and though her love for the Africans appears to be inextricably tied to her seeing herself as the master, the love rIngs true. Meryl Streep has used too many foreign accents on us, and this new one gives her utterances an archness, a formality-it puts quotation marks around everything she says. Still, she's animated in the early scenes; she's amusing when she acts ditsy, and she has some oddly affecting moments. Her character doesn't deepen, though, or come to mean more to us, and Redford doesn't give out with any- thing for her to play against. So she pulls back-the energy goes out of her performance-and they both spend a lot of time displaying their profiles. Redford carries his sunny aura from picture to picture; when he first shows up, you look for his baseball bat. The two best-known things about the dash- ing aristocrat Denys Finch Hatton are that he was British and that he was bald. (He wore a wide array of hats.) Redford is as American as ever, and his fluffy hair is a golden dream. He speaks his lines crisply, but he seems adrift, lost in another movie, and Pol- lack treats him with unseemly rever- ence. His role is a series of grand entrances and lingering exits. Pollack must be trying to set up a glorious doomed romance in an exotic setting, but when Streep and Redford are on safari, drinking wine out of crystal goblets and dancing on the earth be- tween two campfires, or when they're in the wilds and he's shampooing her hair, or even when they head for a jungle tent and everything is primed for passion, they seem too absorbed in themselves to notice each other. At times, Streep looks waxy and ab- stracted in the manner of forties movie stars-it's as if she were wearing a facial mask-and Redford, playing another of his elusive, detached heroes, looks as if he'd been blow-dried away. When Karen suddenly becomes de- manding and explodes at Denys-she wants him to marry her-it's as if a couple of pages from a bad novel about a possessive woman had been pasted into the middle of a National Geo- graphic photo essay. This is "classical" big-star narra- tive moviemaking, but without the logic, the easy-to-read surface, and the sureness that contribute to the pleasure of that kind of picture. A scene during the First World War in which Karen is told that the women and children can't be protected on the farms and must move into town has no follow- through. And when the Baron, who's fighting with the British forces, sends a message to his wife to arrange for supplies to be delivered to them, and she takes them herself, leading an oxen-drawn transport across a sizable chunk of Africa, we aren't cued to know why she has done it, or whether, after she arrives and the Army men stare at her, her husband is proud or aghast. The movie hums a little when Brandauer or Michael Kitchen or ++I l.t. -T Ø,N\. DECEMBER. 30,1985 Suzanna Hamilton (as the young equestrienne Felicity) is on the screen; they're recognizably human. And sev- eral of the black performers are great subjects for David Watkin's camera- Malick Bowens, with his faraway eyes, in particular. There's the occa- sional stunning moment, such as the night scene of the victorious troops returning from the war, the proud black soldiers holding up torches as they march. Sydney Pollack packed the picture with historical verisimilitude, but it seems to be about something nebulous; he failed to give the two main characters and the story an inde- pendent existence. I think he picked the wrong woman writer to make a movie about; he must have been haunted by the familiar image of the aged Isak Dinesen-the bony, syphi- litic high priestess who looked as if she were holding out a vial of poison. His work here exudes uncertainty. D URING the making of "The Color Purple," Steven Spiel- berg's version of the Alice Walker novel about black women's lives in the South in the first half of the century, the advance publicity suggested that he was attempting something "serious." But when you see the movie you real- ize that he was probably attracted by Walker's childlike heroine, Celie, and the book's lyrical presentation of the healing power of love. He may not have understood this, because he ap- proaches the material with undue ti- midity. It's no wonder the novel was popular. On the first page, the four- teen-year-old black drudge Celie is raped by the man she believes to be her father. She gives birth to two children by this brute; he takes the babies away, and she has no idea what he has done with them. Tired of her, he forces her to marry another brute-a widowed farmer who needs her to take care of his children. This man uses her sexu- ally and beats her. When her younger sister, Nettie-the only person who cares for her and doesn't think she's ugly-runs away from the raping fa- ther and comes to stay with her, her husband makes advances to Nettie and, when Nettie fights him, throws her off the property. Poor Celie toils on, with never a kind word coming her way, until her husband brings home Shug Avery, a honky-tonk singer-his true love and sometime mistress-who is sick and needs care. Celie falls in love with the raucous, gutsy Shug (short for "sugar"), and Shug, seeing Celie's true worth, makes love to her. It's the